Thursday, August 11, 2016

Croatia Day 5:Karlovac To Kraljevica Via Rijeka

Today I felt a bit like the lady in this Rijekan statue might feel with a seagull perched on her head!

If you are following sister site Croatia Camping Guide you will see that our first whole day in Croatia started with the dog nearly getting swept away by river rapids and me wading waist deep in water to rescue him. A little miffed with the lack of any sympathy, let alone interest, from anyone at Camp Slapić we quietly dripped away and took the coast road to Rijeka. Deciding to stop in Rijeka for a while we eventually found a suitable car park and had a wander around only to find that our exit ticket wouldn’t work when the time came to leave. This time plenty of people tried to help, but to no avail, and two other motorists had a similar problem. Finally, after about twenty minutes, a very apologetic car park attendant appeared and let us out. It was not too much of a hardship though as we weren’t in a rush and we had a great view of the local harbour, the Inter Continental Hotel, this imperious statue and, of course, the seagulls.

Off we finally went, along the bendy coastal road, admiring yet another magnificent feat of Croatian motorway engineering……..

……until we arrived in Kraljevica, a fascinating place full of contrasts, and found Camp Ostro which will be the next subject of The Croatian Camping Guide

Finally, just to round off day five, we did make our hat trick of disasters eventually. The near doggie drowning and car park confinement was followed, just before midnight, by the discovery of a tick behind the poor doggie’s ear. Fortunately, I had the full tick kit to hand and managed to remove the offending insect without too much distress to either dog or human.

For those who are interested, the full tick kit, pictured below except for the olive oil, consists of a pipette for sucking up olive oil, olive oil that is then dripped on the tick so it suffocates (apparently they breathe through their skin) and therefore relaxes its grip, and a variety of specialist tick removing implements that get under the beast so it can be removed in a twisting action, pincers and all, as it is when the pincers are left behind that most of the damage is done. Tweezers are less effective and should definitely be a tick weapon of last resort. And of course hopefully, if the regular doggie flea and tick treatment is doing its job properly then a tick should drop off of its own accord pretty quickly anyway.